Jade Roper and Tanner Tolbert may be the OG Bachelor in Paradise success story, but that doesn’t mean they have all the answers when it comes to why the show doesn’t always find successful pairings.
“It’s changed so much!” Roper, 34, told Us Weekly exclusively while promoting her Tommee Tippee partnership. “We were discouraged to meet each other or talk to each other before we went on the show because they wanted the onscreen time to be the first time anybody met, and they could see that. But nowadays, everyone hangs out with each other. It’s so different. But I loved Paradise because of the quality time you got with people. I spent more time with Tanner in two days than I did with Chris Soules in seven weeks, you know?”
When asked what advice she’d give future BiP contestants, Roper added, “I would just say enjoy it and have the good conversations because you get that time.”
The “Mommies Tell All” podcast host, who is set to talk all things postpartum life on the April 8 episode of Tommee Tippee’s Spill the Milk series, got engaged to Tolbert during the 2015 finale of season 2. She told Us that halfway through filming she knew Tolbert was The One.
“He actually was supposed to go back to work. He had told his work, ‘I’m just going to go for a little bit and then I’ll be back.’ And he had to make a call and be like, ‘I’m going to stay, sorry, like, fire me if you have to fire me,’” she recalled, noting that he was able to keep his job. “I kind of knew at that point, like, ‘OK, well he’s really committed.’ So, I’m going to just, you know, give him the respect and do the same and just really fully open up and be vulnerable and let’s try to make this work. And so, like, halfway through that was the turning point where I was like, ‘OK, this is serious.’”
When it came time for the proposal day, however, she noted she “ran out of dresses” and was in a panic.
“I had, like, [a] pretty good hunch that I was getting engaged. I didn’t have a dress and I was freaking out,” Roper recalled. “The stylist for the show, the guy who styled Chris Harrison, Cary [Fetman], I think a lot of people know who Cary is, helped me get a dress.”
After tying the knot in front of ABC cameras in 2016, Roper and Tolbert welcomed three kids: Emerson, 3, Brooks, 19 months, and Reed, 4 months.
